A lot of information has been coming out to shine a spotlight on the unjust ways we send money to states, districts and schools, which can fuel us all to do more to eliminate them.
For example, if you’re wondering how much money we’re talking about, a recent study found that predominantly White school districts have access to $23 billion more in state and local funding compared to majority non-White districts. Disparities exist between one state and another, between one district and another within a state, and between one school and another within the same district.
The first two types of disparities—between states and between districts—have been well-documented, especially over the past two years by very smart colleagues at a number of organizations: Education Trust, EdBuild, The Education Law Center, Rutgers University, the Learning Policy Institute, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, among others.
All this information has had some real effects, too. Advocates in many states are working to increase state funds for schools and allocate resources more fairly. Many of those advocates are members of the Education Civil Rights Alliance. They are using all of the tools in the toolbox to fight for just and equitable school funding: policy advocacy, research, communications, legal strategies and grassroots organizing. Perhaps most notably, school funding lawsuits in many states have made an impact.
The many strategies for increased and more equitable funding have yielded some significant successes, but need to grow, since we’re still so far from even where pre-recession education funding levels were in a number of states—and that’s quite far from achieving needed sufficiency and equity in education funding.
The Next Frontier for Fair Funding
But what about funding inequities among schools within a particular district? We’re about to know a lot more. There’s important new information coming out now to shine a spotlight on these intra-district school funding inequities.
The overhaul of federal K-12 education law known as the Every Student S쳮ds Act created a little-known requirement for states and districts to collect and publish per-pupil expenditures for every single public school in the United States. Some of this information has already been published—you can check it out here. As required by the feds, this year’s state school report cards will present even more information, based on data from the 2018-19 school year.
So what’s next? As more data becomes available, the Education Civil Rights Alliance and like-minded organizations will be exploring the data and raising awareness. For example, we hope to highlight districts leading the way toward equity for all their schools. That means we will showcase districts that provide greater resources for schools with greater proportions of higher-need students, including children with disabilities, economically disadvantaged children, English Learners, and other high-need groups.
We also expect to flag some districts in which stark inequities are on display. That’s where you come in. We’ll need folks to
Together, we can create a country where children’s success in education—and in life—is no longer dependent on the ZIP code where they grow up.
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